Demos (a)kurios? Agenda power and democratic control in ancient Greece
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14748851211015331 |
| Author | Matthew Landauer |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
Demos (a)kurios?
Agenda power and
democratic control in
ancient Greece
Matthew Landauer
University of Chicago, USA
Abstract
Ancient Greek elite theorists and ordinary democratic practitioners shared a distinc-
tive account of the institutional features of democracy: democracy requires both insti-
tutions that empower ordinary citizens to decide matters and the widespread diffusion
of agenda-setting powers. In the Politics, Aristotle makes agenda control central to his
understanding of what it is to be kurios in the city, to his distinction between oligarchy
and democracy, and to his analysis of the preconditions for democratic control of the
polis. For democratic citizens, is
egoria (the equal right to speak and make proposals in
the assembly) was more than an expression of the democratic commitment to equality.
It was also an institutional tool to resist oligarchic domination of the agenda.
Institutionalizing is
egoria was part of the Athenian response to a crucial problem for
democratic theory and practice: how to ensure that popular participation reliably
translates into popular control.
Keywords
Agenda power, Aristotle, Athenian democracy, democratic control, isegoria, kurios
“Lacedaemonians, prepare for war as the honour of Sparta demands. Withstand the
advancing power of Athens. Do not let us betray our allies, but, with the Gods on our
side, let us attack the evil-doer.” When Sthenelaidas had thus spoken he, being Ephor,
Corresponding author:
Matthew Landauer, Assistant Professor Political Science, University of Chicago, Pick Hall 413, 5828 S.
University Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Email: landauer@uchicago.edu
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/14748851211015331
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2023, Vol. 22(3) 375–398
himself put the question to the Lacedaemonian assembly. (Thucydides, 2013: I.86–87,
describing a meeting of the Spartan assembly, held to decide whether Athens had
broken the Thirty Years’ Peace)
Introduction
Imagine that you are a research assistant for Aristotle’s great 4th-century
constitution-collecting project. You have been tasked with visiting and gathering
information about a hitherto under-researched polis, Asaphepolis, on the fringes of
the Greek world. On the day you arrive, a mass meeting of the demos, an assembly
of ordinary citizens, is called. You observe thousands of citizens gather together,
on a hillside or in a structure purpose-built for large gatherings. Someone, or
perhaps multiple someones, gets up to address the audience. A proposal is
made, and reasons to adopt it are offered. The audience cheers, and votes (perhaps
by a voice vote, perhaps by a show of hands). The motion passes. You look down
at your survey. Should you check the box next to democracy? Is what you have
observed sufficient to make that judgment?
We might be tempted to answer yes to both questions. Direct popular partic-
ipation in decision making (along with the widespread use of sortition to select
public officials) is the feature of Athenian democracy that most clearly sets it apart
from our own.
1
In the assembly and the popular courts, audiences of ordinary
citizens—the demos—comprised the bodies that “deliberated about common
affairs” (to bouleuomenon peri t
on koin
on): deciding on “war and peace, the
making and breaking of alliances” and “laws”; administering sentences of
“death, exile, and the confiscation of property”; and attending to “the election
and inspection of officials” (Aristotle, 2017: 1297b41–1298a6).
2
Yet for all its
apparent distinctiveness from the modern vantage point, the participation of
mass groups of ordinary citizens in political decision making was not a uniquely
democratic phenomenon in 5th- and 4th-century Greek poleis. The epigraph above
offers an example. In Sparta, ordinary Spartan citizens in the assembly played a
key role in such decisions as whether or not to go to war. Nonetheless, neither
ancient theorists nor democratic citizens considered regimes like Sparta to be
democracies (modern scholars have generally concurred).
3
Attention only to
ancient democracies might obscure this striking fact: the most distinctive feature
of ancient democracy from our perspective—the direct participation of ordinary
citizens in political affairs—was not distinctively democratic. Greek thinkers and
political actors alike were aware that mass, popular political participation was not
the same thing as democratic control of the polis and was therefore not synony-
mous with d
emokratia.
How, then, did the Greeks understand the institutional differences between
regime types? In what follows, I reconstruct Greek views about the institutional
prerequisites and conditions for democratic control. I move beyond a focus on
mass participation and collective decision-making authority to consider a less-
376 European Journal of Political Theory 22(3)
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